James Keach's romantic comedy Blind Dating concerns a 22-year old blind man named Danny (Chris Pine). Though Danny refuses to let his visual deficiency keep him from enjoying every aspect of life, he does shy away from women. When his brother Larry (Eddie Kaye Thomas) discovers Danny is a virgin, he makes every effort to lift that burden from him. Although a series of dates goes very wrong in a number of ways, Danny eventually meets a nurse (Anjali Jay), who agrees to go out with him, although
her Indian family may prove a greater hindrance to their happiness than his medical condition. ~ Perry Seibert, Rovi
The chemistry between Leeza and Danny is the only saving grace of this messy film. It's almost as if the writers couldn't stand to just watch them sweetly fall in love.
Blind Dating also manages to be an incredibly muddled 95 minutes in which emotions are replaced by aggressive music cues to force the viewer to care for characters that are paper thin at best.
While Pine is superb in the lead role, almost everything else fails to convince in this vastly uneven, unfunny and only sporadically dramatic enterprise.
Small wonder this hard-to-swallow cocktail of bawdy comedy, cross-cultural romance and issue-of-the-week melodrama was left on the shelf for three years. The marketing people can't have had a clue what to do with it.
It's Pine that keeps the whole thing afloat, and he manages, astonishingly, to make even the clunkiest, cheesiest lines work, almost transforming the film's chocolate-box sentiments into something honest.
An uneven mixture of crude high jinks and sweet romance, this just about makes the grade thanks to its breezy geniality and Pine's charismatic performance as Danny.
This film wavers between a sweet rom-com, a gross-out romp and a drama about diversity. Thanks to a strong cast, these three elements work on their own, but struggle to make much sense together.
The fact that Blind Dating provides a relationship between two characters whom the audience desperately wants to see wind up together is ultimately all that matters.
If it weren't for Chris Pine's natural charm, this movie probably wouldn't have been half as good. I'm not usually a fan of romantic comedies, but I found that I really liked this one, for its main character as well as those around him. I really sympathized with Danny's desire to be independant and find love, and his
blindness wasn't so much a physical handicap for him as it was a social handicap that influenced other people's treatment of him. There is also a parallel storyline of Danny volunteering to undergo experimental surgery that could potentiall grant him limited vision, but it takes a backseat to the romance story. The humour in this one is genuinely funny without being mean-spirited, and he ending, while unorthodox is both happy and satusfying.
I really wish I could say this wasn't cheesy or lame, but it really is for the most part. The only redeeming quality is Chris Pine's really great performance. No one must have told him how dumb and ridiculous it was going to be because his character is really well developed and realistic. Now for a straight-to-video
movie it's not the worst, but it just has all those stereotypical quirky moments that have long since been considered cute or even amusing.
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